Business North - The Daily Briefing - Business Newspaper OnlineBarr celebrates move to larger Duluth office

7/26/2014

A small satellite office established in Duluth during 1997 has grown to become Barr Engineering’s second largest, company executives said Friday as the engineering firm celebrated a significant expansion.

Barr this year moved from the Providence Building, where it had outgrown the available space, to the Waterfront Plaza in Canal Park, where it is leasing 40,000 square feet.

“It wasn’t what we were looking for, but it was everything we could hope for,” said Minneapolis-based Bill Forsmark, Barr’s director of business development.

Seventeen years ago, he explained, Barr leased office space in Duluth because some local engineers had been commuting 160 miles to the firm’s Minneapolis headquarters. Company execs, he said, feared it would be difficult to retain its Duluth engineers unless they could work locally.

“Initially, we felt there would be from 20 to 40 people here,” Forsmark said. But the office had grown to 60 by 2011 and currently houses more than 110.

Growth in the mining, power generation and fuels industries are propelling Barr’s Duluth growth, said branch office coordinator Sheryl Filby Williams. If that growth continues, the Waterfront Plaza building offers room to grow. She said Barr currently occupies all of the seventh floor and part of a second level.

The space, which overlooks Lake Superior, was totally remodeled to accommodate the employee-owned firm, which also has offices in Minneapolis; Hibbing; Ann Arbor, Mich.; Jefferson City, Mo.; Bismarck, ND, and Calgary, Alberta.

“You bring energy, new ideas and many young faces. We couldn’t be more happy,” said Toni Meierhoff, whose family has owned the structure since the 1960s.